Revision as of 21:44, 18 January 2011

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the hackerspace Noisebridge, our ongoing mission to explore strange (yet economically priced) new ascent technologies; to seek out new parts and new partnerships; to boldly go where no non-government-or-massively-industrially-funded-group has gone before.

Contents

Project Summary

The Spacebridge project can be broken up into 3 parts. The payload delivery system, payload bus, and the payload itself.

The delivery system is currently a meteorological weather balloon that lofts our system about 100k feet into the air (commercial airlines fly at around 32k feet). The system also includes flight lights for increased visibility, a radar reflector dish for visibility by radar tracking systems, and a four foot parachute to help slow the decent.

The payload bus is an environmentally protecting enclosure that keeps all the payload items secure and in a known orientation and attached to necessary ports. It also protects the electronic equipment from the cold (it's around -30 degrees up there).

Lastly, we have the payload itself. We currently loft 2 cameras that have been hack so that custom software can be run on them. We also send up an android cell phone which records accelerometer, magnetometer and GPS data, and text messages me the GPS data for our recovery. We also send up a secondary tracking system that consists of a commercial GPS tracking system, an opentracker (a custom made system to convert the GPS signals into APRS data packets) and a ham radio to transmit those data packets.